Create your world

For the last ten days we’ve been sharing our house with some French friends – a family of four. They more than doubled our numbers. It’s a smallish house. We speak different languages. We eat different food. We have different ways. Ten days, seven three-course dinners and a party for twenty and I’m pretty much fit for nothing else but putting my feet up today.

All to be expected but as I sit here reflecting on the experience, I’m wondering if I’ve learned anything more about myself. When we go house-swapping, stay with friends or have them stay with us, we usually discover a little more about who we are, what we like, what we hope for. Was it any different this time?

Space to soar

Sharing my work space with the dining room is okay when it is just us three, but this new artistic life of mine relies on a quiet and peaceful environment. If we are to share our home with visitors, I need a dedicated office with a door I can close. But it isn’t just the practicality of receiving visitors.

I’ve been feeling a little constrained by the smallish space I’ve gleaned for myself at the end of the room, anyway. Six months in and I need to stretch my creative wings. Unlike the crochet that sits untouched in the bag beside my armchair, this isn’t a passing phase – it just keeps getting bigger. Sometimes this is a delightful surprise to me and I wonder if I really deserve it, this wonderfully rich and beautiful life.

The good life

I’ve lost count of the amount of times someone has told me how lucky I am to be able to live the life I do. To work from home. To spend time with my family. Travel for weeks at a time. Make art for a living. But I don’t think I’m lucky at all. Let me be clear – I count my blessings every day, and of those there are many. But lucky? No.

The fact is, I’ve spent years cultivating this good life of mine. It hasn’t been and still isn’t free from hardship. For the last ten years I’ve been deliberately working towards this very point in time, although I couldn’t name this point back then. For ten years, I’ve been learning, changing, improving and making sometimes difficult choices along the way. For two of those, I was completely and utterly lost.

Create your world

I’m not saying it needs to be difficult all the time. I’m not saying it will always feel easy. It will simply come as it does. What I do know is that you can choose your life. Not how you came into it, and very likely not how you leave it. But you can choose what you do with it now. How you live today. I speak to so many people who tell me what they really want is impossible. I don’t believe it.

The ultimate lesson, then from this latest visit? That I believe (almost) everyone can create the life they choose – no luck required.

Pioneering, having the courage to chart your own course – that is not easy. Often times it is unbelievably hard. I often want to go back – interesting, I wonder where to, and it probably is about 10 years ago – but can’t, nothing for it but to keep on sailing 🙂

Yes it’s 10 years ago for me too, I’ve recently been wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t made those decisions. I’d be a basket case full of anti depressants, ill health and would never had the sense of love I have thanks to people like you Julie as we’d never ever have crossed paths.

Yay for creating the life you want, indeed it isn’t always easy & often quite scary but its the belief that we can do it that keeps us going & the inspiration & supposrt from others on similar paths too ~ I have been in the process of creating mine for the last 7yrs. thank you sweetie for flying the flag so boldly and leaving sprinkles of inspiration in your wake x

We’d love to welcome you there – which Clan do you think you are? Salmon, Adder, Deer or Beastie?Entry is open from only $2 per month and there you will be offered regular invitations to the more-than-ordinary and the everyday, both.